This year’s Tour de France Femmes: most geologically diverse route ever

While Paris is still sweltering with Olympic fever, the Geo-Sports team is already gearing up for Europe’s next big sports event: the Tour de France Femmes, which will start in Rotterdam on 12 August. Once again, Geo-Sports will add geological colour to the commentary by explaining how the landscape of the Tour was created, and what there is to see along the route. Because as the video clips and blogs published by Utrecht University’s initiative have proven time and again, geology is what makes the Tour de France such a compelling race. The videos and blog posts are free for use by third parties for online articles about the Tour.

For the first time in its history, the Tour de France Femmes will not start in the sedimentary basins or crystalline massifs of France. Instead, the world’s largest cycling event for women will start below sea level. The first stages, around Rotterdam, Dordrecht and the iconic windmill village of Kinderdijk will lead the peloton through the man-made polders of Holland. The organisers have called these stages ‘level’, but Dutch cyclists and geologists would beg to differ! As Geo-Sports will illustrate in their familiar blogs and a video hosted by Douwe van Hinsbergen, the cyclists will constantly have to climb above sea level, then descend back below. The reports will show how those few meters have had a decisive influence on Dutch history and culture.

Rock star

From the polders, the route will continue towards the south of the Dutch province of Limburg. As the cyclists power up the Geulhemmerberg hill, they’ll pass the layer of rock that was formed when the dinosaurs went extinct. Geo-Sports recorded a video clip especially for this stage, featuring Dutch ‘rock star of palaeontology’ and PhD candidate at Uppsala University in Sweden, Melanie During, who discovered that the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs must have hit the earth in springtime.

Croissant

In France, the cyclists will first tackle the Alps’ distant cousin: the Jura mountains. Did you know that the Jurassic period is named after this mountain range? And did you know why it has such a typical croissant shape? Geo-Sports’ own Marjolein Naudé will explain how the Jura ‘slipped over a banana peel’. She then takes you to the most iconic climb in the world of cycling: the Alpe d’Huez, revealing that this mountain is actually one gigantic fold!

These stories and more, including geothermal energy and biodiversity in the Port of Rotterdam, will all be featured in the latest series about the Geology of the Tour de France. The blogs will be posted at https://www.geo-sports.org/ and the videos will be available during the ITV Tour reports and via the Geo-Sports YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Geo-Sports.